The DoFactory website documents the Gang of Four Design Patterns. There are 23 of these patterns and they have been around for quite a while (15 years or so). Over the last decade many more Design Pattern have been 'discovered' and documented. One of which is the Repository Pattern.

The Repository Pattern is typically used to provide a standard CRUD (Create Read Update, Delete) interface to the Service Layer. It will have methods like:

GetList<Customer>
Get<Customer>
Insert<Customer>
Update<Customer>

etc.

BTW: the Design Pattern Framework does not include the Repository Pattern either. They use a different model, i.e. a high-level Request / Response model that can be exposed as a webservice.

Anyhow, I hope this answers your question.

Dan.

2 comments

I forgot to mention that the Repository Pattern will be included in the upcoming VS 2010 / .NET 4 release. --- Dan McMillanApr 01, 2010